COP21 Paris about to start

From Monday 30 November till Wednesday 11 December, the 21st Convention of Parties of the United Nations Conference on Climate Change –COP21 in short- will take place. A lot of attention has been going to this convention. The main reason for this is the fact that the main goal of this convention is to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on the climate, with the aim of keeping global warming below a global average of 2 degrees Celsius. A very ambitious, but necessary goal indeed. A grand total of 150 heads of state are expected to arrive on 30 November in Paris, making this an international diplomatic conference of unprecedented magnitude. Should the Convention prove successful, we would be looking at a global-scale effort to not only adapt to climate change and bring down global carbon emissions, but actually re-capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it on a time scale of millenia.

Already in the IPCC reports of 2014, measures such as afforestation, land use change and carbon capture and storage (CCS) have been put forward as parts of the climate mitigation portfolio. In our opinion, far too little attention is spent on mineral weathering and Enhanced Weathering of Olivine (EWO) in particular. This is in part due to the fact that not much is published about EWO. Large-scale EWO may contribute to atmospheric carbon sequestration, and when applied in coastal sediment management programmes, may prove to be relatively simple to implement. We hope that our research may fill some of the knowledge gaps, so that we can contribute to the climate solution.

OLIvOA now operates from the Institute of Oceanography - University of São Paulo

About us

OLIvOA is a research initiative investigating the use of enhanced weathering of the silicate mineral olivine against Ocean Acidification. Olivine weathering causes the seawater to become less acidic and increases its capacity to take up (more) carbon dioxide (CO2).

OLIvOA 'headquarters' is currently located in Brazil, but collaborates with researchers from all over the world. The epicenter of OLIvOA research is (still) in Europe.